Follow up to: Of Oughts and Is, Part III

Author’s Note: Honestly, this essay will likely make very little sense to you unless you start from the very beginning. At best you will want to backtrack all the “follow up to”s, but I think you can get by fine with reading just “Don’t Smuggle Your Connotations”, “The Folly of Debating Definitions”, “The Map and The Territory”, “The Meaning of Morality”, and “Of Ought and Is, Part I” “…Part II” and “…Part III”. (If you feel like this is too much prerequisite reading, read “The Sad Truth of Inferential Distance” to understand why I would do something like this.)

This is a recanted essay!: From the comments I’ve been getting, I now know that I definitely haven’t been as clear in communicating my views as I thought I was. Thus, I’m going to be scrapping this essay as a draft and starting over. Please note that this is an old and outdated draft of this essay. See “I’m Never As Clear As I Think I Am” for more information.

In “The Meaning of Morality”, I decided to crack open our notions of “morality” and “good” to see what was inside. This turned out to start an adventure through the tunnels of normativity, and will keep us on a train that will go for quite awhile longer, because there is a lot to say.

The first big idea was breaking apart the claim that an action fit the label “good” and the claim that we have some sort of intrinsic motivation (reason for action) to preform that action. This was the idea of pluralistic moral reductionism — that the word “good” was just that, a word, and like other words it could have multiple, even mutually exclusive definitions. Thus as long as we did not smuggle the connotation of intrinsic motivation, we could avoid the massive folly of endless squabbling over what exactly is “good” or not.

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Direct Continuation of: Of Oughts and Is, Part II

This is a recanted essay!: As a result of feedback with others who have read this, I now recognize this essay as misleadingly incomplete and partially inaccurate. I keep it up as a record of how I have previously thought, but do not stand by all of it.

In “The Meaning of Morality” we applied the many problems with definitions in general to the problem of defining “moral good” — specifically, there were many different, mutually exclusive candidates for the definition, and equivocations made theories sound like they worked when they did not.

In “Of Oughts and Is, Part I” and “Of Oughts and Is, Part II”, I outlined this problem more explicitly: to any statement that we ought to do something, we can coherently ask “Why?”. Why is it the case that we ought to do what this specific moral theory says? Looking at many attempts to answer this question — moral non-naturalism, the categorical imperative, Searle’s appeal to institutions, and Aristotelianism — show that this extra step is still missing.

Now, for the final part in this series, I analyze a few more attempts to provide this oomph needed to make sense of “oughtness”, or normativity, looking to Gewirth, Ayn Rand, and even religion! And I find failure no matter where I turn. However, I end with a positive note not to give up, and promise coherent normativity is just around the corner as this series continues.

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Direct Continuation of: Of Oughts and Is, Part I

This is a recanted essay!: As a result of feedback with others who have read this, I now recognize this essay as misleadingly incomplete and partially inaccurate. I keep it up as a record of how I have previously thought, but do not stand by all of it.

We started in “The Meaning of Morality” by applying all our thinking about definitions to the meaning of “good”, finding out that there are multiple definitions of good, all of which work perfectly fine, even if they are mutually exclusive — just like multiple definitions of sound or free will.

In “Of Oughts and Is, Part I”, we continued this to the word “ought”, or that which we are motivated or compelled to do. Looking at Hume’s Is-Ought Problem, we found that just because something is said to be “good” does not automatically imply this motivation, and instead we must look for further justification. We found that this justification could not be found in Moore’s concept of moral non-naturalism or found in Kant’s concept of the categorical imperative.

Now let’s join this with two more views on the Is-Ought Problem: Institutional Facts and Aristotelianism.

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This is a recanted essay!: As a result of feedback with others who have read this, I now recognize this essay as misleadingly incomplete and partially inaccurate. I keep it up as a record of how I have previously thought, but do not stand by all of it.

One of the best reasons to be an atheist is that there is no reason to think that God exists. I think that every argument that claims to demonstrate the existence of God actually doesn’t, either having a false premise, an invalid conclusion, or both. As such, I started on a quest to blog about every argument I heard of and show exactly where and how it failed.

One of my friends and a commenter on this blog noted to me personally that while my argument was all fine and dandy, and while I did seem to contribute some original insight, equally decisive refutations of the Ontological Argument have existed on dozens of other website for ages. Why re-invent the wheel?

I thought that comment was very wise, and I want to take it to heart. There is no reason for me to spend my time writing about why all the arguments against God fail if dozens of other atheists who have came before me already have done so. Not only would I trivialize their great work, but I would be deliberately wasting my time by stubbornly refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants.

So here is what I’m going to do: this essay I’m going to list every argument I’ve heard of that attempts to demonstrate the existence of a god, give a brief bulleted overview of why the argument doesn’t actually prove what it seems to, and then link to the good work that I think decisively takes down the argument. I will retain the right to write about these arguments in more detail when I feel that they’re relevant to something else I’m doing or if someone else asks me to, but this should be pretty much the last time I go out of my way to deal with these things.

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Follow up to: The Meaning of Morality

This is a recanted essay!: As a result of feedback with others who have read this, I now recognize this essay as misleadingly incomplete and partially inaccurate. I keep it up as a record of how I have previously thought, but do not stand by all of it.

Oughtness is a persistent part of our moral language — that we ought to do this, and not that. Perhaps you hear it said that you ought to be vegetarian, that you ought to be nice to others, that you ought to brush your teeth, that you ought not tell lies, that you ought to be patriotic, or that you ought to give lots of money to charities sponsored by GiveWell.

When we last left off in “The Meaning of Morality”, we mentioned that moral claims such as “being nice to people is good” can refer to many different things, depending on how the word good is defined. Does “good” refer to “that which maximizes happiness” or “in accord with duty”? Well, it depends solely on your definition, and there’s no privileged definition here.

But we also learned that a lot of these claims are linked to the notion that we ought to do what is good — again, for instance, Bentham defines good not just as “that which achieves the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people”, but also suggests that we all ought to have this as our aim.

And many more philosophers follow suit, without really taking time to explain how this bridge is jumped. How do we get from a definition of good, of which there are many, to a claim that we ought to enact this definition in our personal actions?

And what the hell do we mean by “ought”?

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